Smart structures for rotorcraft control (SSRC) II

The Smart Structures for Rotor Control (SSRC) is a consortium under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Smart Structures program. Phase I of the program was administered by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, with Boeing Seattle as the consortium administrator, and MIT, PSU and Boeing Helicopters as the other principal consortium members. Phase II, renamed Smart Materials and Structures Demonstration Consortium (SMSDC), is a combination of the proposed Phase II efforts of SSRC and the Boeing MESA Smart Materials Actuated Rotor Technology (SMART) program. This paper summarizes the SSRC efforts, introduces the SMSDC program, and provides a framework for the relationships between specific SSRC technical papers in this conference. The SSRC objectives were to research smart structure methods to achieve reduced rotorcraft vibration, reduce acoustic noise, and increased performance. The SSRC program includes dynamic piezoelectric actuation of flaps on the rotor blades, distributed dynamic piezo actuation of the rotor twist, and quasi-steady rotor twist control using shape memory alloys. The objective of Phase II is then to fly a rotorcraft to demonstrate such a system.